Travelocity will soon launch the next phase of a personalization effort with an ad on the site's home page offering travel deals based on the visitor's identity, writes DM News. The concept is similar to Travelocity's two-month-old system of serving ads based on the site visitor's geographic location, according to IP address. Travelocity's efforts point to increasing sophistication in making e-commerce personalized and customer-relevant.

"What we've basically done is taken our customer data warehouse and our deal-finding data and stored them in our warehouse, and then we…make that accessible to our front end," according to Laura J. Johnston, vice-president of customer relationships at Travelocity.

Travelocity's latest relationship marketing initiative is driven by a need to differentiate itself in the competitive and lucrative online travel category.

"We don't want to mass-market irrelevant ads to customers," Johnston is quoted as saying. "Given all the competition for customers, we think it's important to make those customer conversations meaningful or based on either where they live or what they've expressed interest in. Being more relevant to customers, at a minimum, doubles performance."